Threat from AT&T to pull my plug [telecom]

It turns out this isn't new, AT&T has been doing this for several years, under the guise of "upgrading" their hardware.

I spoke with a local ISP who provides DSL over AT&T POTS lines. They say there's no indication copper service is going away. However, I gather there's nothing to keep AT&T from discontinuing DSL service. That means I can keep POTS but will have to pay another ISP for DSL service, which looks ~30% more expensive and will change my IP numbers.

Which leads into:

I think the CNAME is coming from my ISP, AT&T. It isn't found in my /usr/local/etc/namedb/* files.

It's always troubled me how somebody wanting to reverse search, say

69.239.235.194 figures out the correct inverse name to query without knowing it's part of a /29 network. The ISP sets the netbock boundaries, so it makes sense if they're the ones to answer the query.

My guess (if I'm wrong please point it out!) is that the ISP transfers the forward zones and manufactures reverse zones to match. Near as I can tell ISPs are responsible for correct reverse lookups and registrants are responsible for forward lookups

Since there's some risk I'll have to reconfigure my nameservers if forced to change netblock I'd be grateful for any further enlightenment.

Thanks for reading!

bob prohaska

***** Moderator's Note *****

I don't know if I can provide any enlightenment: the "zefox" domain went to a website that says only "It Works!", so I decided to dig (pun intended) around.

My only experience with fixed IP's from mega-ISPs is with those provided by Comcast: they supplied a /30 in the 10.0.0.0 range given for detached netwroks in RFC1918, and mapped it to the actual IP somewhere in their cloud. That was, of course, for a single IP: I assume they would just supply a larger subnet for multiple IPs, but I hadn't know that AT&T used "public" IP numbers for this purpose.

Bill

This is RFC 2317 classless IN-ADDR.PTR delegation. It's been around for

2 decades.

- - Barry Margolin, snipped-for-privacy@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA

*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

***** Moderator's Note *****

That's nice to know: I've been back in the tip-and-ring business for a few years, and I'm out-of-date. I've got to learn about SPF records and DKIM first, but I'll read the RFC and get up to speed.

Bill

That's a setup artifact, left in place to impede blind bots. If the bot understand ~username it'll find something to look at.

Last I checked cable companies generally discourage the running of servers. Did you have a public address by which folks could connect to your machines?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

I've decided to change service to the local ISP, an outfit called Omsoft. Service is due to switch over on Monday, March 12.

The ISP is suggesting it might be necessary to change the DSL modem, and I wondered if: A) it's really true?

B) if it is true, what is a good choice of modem?

The old Cayman 3546 has worked faithfully for over ten years, and very little I read about DSL modems suggests new is better than old. Indeed, it appears there aren't many suppliers of new modems left.

Any thoughts appreciated, please reply quickly!

8-)

bob prohaska

Maybe? Best to ask them the specifics. They probably know best. There are many flavors of DSL, the standard constantly gets updated, requir- ing newer hardware to support the newer standards. eg. CenturyLink around here rolls out VDSL often now, which most likely isn't sup- ported by your old DSL router.

None of the above. Although ActionTec seems the least sucky to me.

Personally, I've gone with obtaining whatever the ISP offers, turn it into a bridge, and then run PPPoE authentication (if the ISP supports it) from a firewall behind the DSL router/bridge to login to the ISP. Lots of firewall options, they tend to offer much better feature sets. Even free ones like pfsense tend to be lightyears better.